Politics

It isn’t news to say the Johnson administration doesn’t understand how to fight Covid-19 or reopen schools or save the economy. But the knowledge that it doesn’t understand the people who put it in power is new and worth hearing. A poll given to The Spectator today by the Best for Britain think tank shows the gap between ‘Red Wall’ voters and the Tory elite in London is dizzyingly wide. It reports overwhelming opposition to a no-deal Brexit in the seats that put Johnson in Downing Street. As striking is the widespread concern about living standards and equally valid worries about the Conservatives tying Britain to the Trump administration. Best for

By most measures Keir Starmer has, politically speaking, won the war when it comes to Covid. Since becoming Labour leader in early April he has hardly put a foot wrong, balancing his desire to appear supportive of Boris Johnson’s government during this unique moment of national crisis while retaining the freedom to expose and criticise its many mistakes. But as Britain comes out of lockdown, can he win the peace? In the early stages of the lockdown voters were uncertain about the new Labour leader and, understandably, rallied behind Johnson: according to YouGov, in April 46 per cent thought Boris Johnson was best qualified to be Prime Minister, while only

The Tories claimed a monumental election victory because of voters in seats like mine, Rother Valley, who placed their faith in our vision for Brexit. An extension to the transition period is unthinkable and would be a betrayal of all those former ‘Red Wall’ voters. We enshrined December 2020 into law for a reason: to communicate our steadfast intent and iron resolve with regards to extricating ourselves from the EU once and for all. Time and again, I speak to constituents who remind me of the sacrosanctity of this Brexit promise. As a party and a country, we must remember that Brexit is one of the highest priorities for voters in

The government may have resigned itself to keeping schools closed for the majority of pupils until September but there’s a simple solution to the classroom capacity problem sitting at the heart of every town and village in Britain. The Archbishop of Canterbury Justin Welby has been busy speaking out about everything from future government austerity to historic racism in the Church of England in recent weeks, while a dozen of his bishops publicly denounced Boris Johnson’s decision to keep Dominic Cummings in post. All the while, the Church of England is residing over a huge pile of sizeable real estate that could enable schools to scale up in the same

Locking down Britain sooner would have saved thousands of lives, according to Neil Ferguson. But while Ferguson’s claims have been rightly contested – and the merits of shutting down Britain, particularly in view of today’s woeful GDP figures – remain debatable, one thing is very clear: lockdown is having a dreadful effect on the lives of many. A survey from Italy, which went into lockdown a few weeks before Britain, shows why. 20,000 people were quizzed by researchers at the Mario Negri Institute in Milan on the psychological consequences of forcing people to quarantine themselves. And the findings – almost certainly replicable in Britain – make for grim reading. Over